Traditional floor boards are installed via nail down or glue down methods. Recently, floor boards can be installed via floating method with mechanical locks. Most of these mechanical locks are based on a mechanism of flipping down on one edge to lock and sliding into another edge to secure the entire board. The locks require precision milling for the locks to work properly and small deformation of flooring panel after milling will render the locks unusable. This deformation makes these locks difficult to apply to solid hardwood floor where possible deformation is much larger than the deformation for laminate or engineered floor.
Most of mechanical locks could not apply to thin floor, especially thin solid wood floor. This is because wood grooves with the locks are too thin and easily to crack or break, especially as it getting thinner.
Therefore, there is a need for a locking mechanism that accepts deformation of floor boards, especially thin floor boards. It is to this apparatus the present invention is primarily directed to.